We're invited to stay overnight in a friend's penthouse, and when we park our new Defender in front of it, I have doubts about whether the car is safe there. Too often we have been warned at home about crime and violence at the hands of deceitful and unscrupulous Africans: “They will steal from you, plunder and pillage you!”
We also had to listen to what we were all about: irresponsible because we were taking our one-year-old daughter with us. Naive because we didn't pack the usual functional clothes, camping gear or sleeping bags.
No, we don't. Instead, we loaded up with beautiful clothes, china and camel hair bedspreads – and a silver champagne bucket big enough to bathe our daughter or wash our dirty laundry. When we were preparing for this trip, we never saw Africans in any book or film riding through the desert or hiking through the mountains in functional clothing, going to the restaurant in a water-repellent functional parka or going to the supermarket in trekking boots.
